Set your scene with three or four details. Here are ten ideas of what Pat Carr meant by sensory details and then an example from my story set on a playground.
- Odor – wet sand
- A time of day or season – end of summer
- Temperature – warm and humid
- Sound – children laughing
- Important object – small charm bracelet
- Dominant color – beige
- Dominant shape — circles
- Something that can be touched – curly hair
- Taste – rain in the air
- Certain slant of light – late afternoon sun
I love numbering 10 things. Pat was inspired by Emily Dickinson, “Tell all the Truth but tell it slant.”
Light is so important.
This is a repost from when I attended Southern writer Pat Carr’s Memoir and Fiction Writing class at the International Women’s Writing Guild. I wrote this from a sun-soaked bench, cloistered in a square at Yale University.
Pat Carr’s writing exercises, like this one, can be found in her book Writing Fiction with Pat Carr. Her new memoir is One Page at a Time: On a Writing Life.
100 Days of Poems and Pics 